Ukraine president says incursion into Russia is part of plan to end war

KYIV - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday that this month’s lightning-fast incursion into Russia - where almost 600 Russian soldiers have been captured so far - is part of a larger plan to end the war in his country.

Speaking at a news conference of top officials, Zelensky said he had no plans to permanently annex the region and will present his plan to President Joe Biden - along with presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump - this fall.

“The main point … is forcing Russia to end the war,” Zelensky said. “We really want justice for Ukraine. And if this plan is accepted - and, second, if it is executed - we believe that the main goal will be reached.”

He declined to provide details of his plan.

Part of the Kursk border region, including the town of Sudzha, was taken in a surprise attack on Aug. 6, raising spirits for many Ukrainians frustrated by their military’s inability to reclaim land lost to Russia - though it raised questions about what the operation’s end game is and whether it will come at the cost of land in Ukraine’s east.

Ukraine’s military commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, said the blitz had so far resulted in the capture of 100 settlements, along with the 594 Russian soldiers. Ukraine is holding about 500 square miles in Kursk and is still advancing and “dealing palpable damage,” Syrsky said. But Russia has moved more than 30,000 soldiers to the area, many from the battlefields in Ukraine’s south, and there are about “50 clashes with the enemy” daily.

The most intense fighting, though, has continued in eastern Ukraine, where Russia’s steady advance to conquer the entire Donbas industrial region moves forward. Key to this battle is the logistical hub of Pokrovsk at the junction of two major roads. Ukraine’s military is “doing everything possible to stabilize the situation in this direction,” Syrsky said, but the situation remains “quite difficult.”

As these battles raged, Ukraine on Tuesday suffered another wave of drone and missile strikes, which smashed a hotel often frequented by journalists in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, killing two people. The attack came days after a hotel in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine was struck, killing a security adviser for the Reuters news agency and injuring two of its journalists.

Early Monday, Russia launched one of its largest waves of strikes in the war, soon after Ukraine’s Independence Day, targeting power infrastructure and causing outages across the country. The two waves of strikes killed at least 10 people and injured dozens.

Zelensky confirmed that Ukraine had used F-16 fighter jets acquired from Western allies - aircraft the country had long insisted would be a game changer in the war - to shoot down some of the Russian missiles.

Even before Zelensky’s announcement about a new plan to end the war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday dismissed Ukraine’s attempts at negotiations.

“If the West is interested in normalizing the situation in Europe, it is necessary to sit down at the negotiating table without paperwork in the form of the ‘Zelensky formula,’” he said, referring to an earlier peace summit that did not include Russia.

Russia has also accused Ukrainian forces of endangering its nuclear power plant in the city of Kursk, about 25 miles from the front line. The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency was inspecting the site Tuesday.

“Regarding the operation of the nuclear power plant, what I’ve seen is that the station is operating in very close to normal conditions,” Rafael Grossi said in a news conference in the Kursk region. “However, it is clear that all of that does not deny the fact that there has been activity near here. I was informed about the impact of drones. I was shown some of the remnants of those and the signs of the impact they had.”

He said that equating the situation at the Kursk plant with Chernobyl - site of a 1986 nuclear disaster - was “an exaggeration,” but that “it is the same type of reaction and there is no specific protection, and this is very, very important.”

Russia’s FSB security service has opened criminal cases against seven foreign journalists for what it maintains was their illegal crossing into Russian territory to report from Kursk.

Citing the FSB, Russian state news agencies reported Tuesday that additional cases had been opened against a correspondent for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and a journalist from Ukraine’s 1+1 TV channel following their reports from Sudzha.

Earlier this month, the FSB reported that it had initiated criminal proceedings against journalists from CNN and Italian broadcaster RAI.

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Serhii Korolchuk and Anastacia Galouchka in Kyiv, Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, and Francesca Ebel and Paul Schemm in London contributed to this report.